A Buddhist View of Time

In this moment, you are nowhere but this moment.

The past has already happened, and the future does not yet exist, all you really know is the present. Think of a clock. A clock does not know what has happened or what is going to happen, it can only tell what is. A clock will not tell you “It is currently 7:56, one minute ago it was 7:55, and in one minute it will be 7:57”. And yes, I am aware you could easily program a clock to do such a thing but this is not how clocks are intended to work. In the same respect, this is not how humans are intended to function.

Life is simply a composition of infinite instants of consciousness, such as in a movie only one frame can occur at any given time. By extension, the past and the future can only exist in our present perception. Right now, the past is only present memories of what already was. The future is just present memories inverted to fit our illusion of what will be. In this way we are living in an eternal present, where what we think is “time” is just the present mind.

Albert Einstein, one of the wisest men to walk the Earth, has told us that the distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion and by extension, time is an illusion. Einstein’s theory coincides with Buddhist philosophy in that there only ever was, and ever will be, the present.

The takeaway here: don’t worry about what has happened, and don’t worry about what is going to happen. It’s irrational for people to let the past and the future bother them when the past and future are both just projections of our own mind, nonexistent past our own perception. This is not to say that we should pretend to ignore the past, or disregard the future, but it is important to realize that we can only control what is. When one can recognize and correct this illusion, they will be free of the delusion that there is some other place to be rather than here and now.

Only then will the mind will exist beyond time.